Cyberpunk 2077 Patch 1.5 review: still not enough to be truly great

Cyberpunk 2077 This was the most anticipated release of 2020.

The newest project from The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red, it was promoted as a sea change in video games that would merge the deep history of R. Talsorian Games’ sprawling cyberpunk Night City with storytelling chops that made Geralt’s adventures in The Witcher so compelling for so many of us. It was all portrayed in first-person perspective, to really sell us on our protagonist V’s embodied relationship with the world around them.

However, this was not a common move in cyberpunk. There was an obvious difference between what people were hyping and actually happening. Reviewers and players pointed out a number of issues that led to the game’s disappointing launch. These included a slow pace, lackluster gameplay and an insufficient narrative. There were a number of technical issues that rapidly transformed this situation. Cyberpunk 2077 It turned into a source of glitchy memes, and revealed a game that was rushed to completion under difficult circumstances. Substantial performance errors prompted its removal from Sony’s PlayStation Store, and the intervening months have been a slow crawl of CD Projekt fixing, adding, and tweaking the game in incremental updates — an extensive bid to bring it in line with its marketing promises.

Now, 16 months later, the prevailing question I am still regularly asked is, “Is Cyberpunk 2077 ‘good’ now?”

Image: CD Projekt Red

CD Projekt issued version 1.5 in February 2022. Cyberpunk 2077. This patch contains many fixes and tweaks, as well new content. It also supports native Xbox Series X support. It takes a lot of time to read the patch notes, but it is generally true that CD Projekt has overhauled almost every part of the game systems. Cyberpunk 2077From combat AI to player stats functions to the economy to how vehicles operate, all of it is covered.

This isn’t a new concept for the developer. The company did similar world and system overhauls in the sequels to Witcher 2. However, this is the first time that a single patch has had the weight of “fixing” an entire game on its back. It is a heavy weight, and I’d be lying if I said that having to evaluate how “fixed” the game is did not weigh on me heavily as I booted the game up on Playstation 5 once it was re-launched back in February.

Over the past weeks, I have enjoyed a leisurely playthrough Cyberpunk 2077 It was my first attempt. Since I didn’t play the first game, my eyes feel fresh and ready to go for the second. My verdict, put shortly, if you’re looking for the soundbite: Cyberpunk 2077 It’s a very good game.

It works. The world it takes place is not the one everyone expected at launch. The Night City is populated by people who are trying to climb the ranks. It is possible to move from the streets to the perfect megatowers suites with stunning skylines without too much effort. The various missions weave V through the political realities that are spatially rendered in cyberpunk media the same as any other piece.

Image: CD Projekt Red

Based upon reading the reviews Cyberpunk 2077Comparing it with my own experience in completing the task Cyberpunk 2077 – New Over the last few days it has become apparent that there is a crucial difference in intensity between pre-1.5 and post-1.5. CD Projekt appeared to have nailed the launch. scale, The world seemed large and futuristic. It failed to grasp a sense Density, a feeling that this big world contained functioning people — other than the player character — going about their business. It was as though the game world had no sense of weight.

A strange sign of videogame culture is that this is what we want most. Because the entire game world is designed to give players a sense of importance, it is technically an illusion. In any game, the people walking on sidewalks aren’t full-fledged people. These people are not there to provide context and an aesthetic feel to players speeding past them in their future cars. These fantasies are fulfilled if there’s a key move in patch 1.5. They are very in touch with the environment and panic when there is gunfire nearby. They behave “realistically,” and like most of the non-player content in the game, seem to be a drastic leap forward from the videos you might remember from the disturbingly gleeful “look at this shit” responses that highlighted technical problems in 2020.

It also appears that the combat is very different to what was released in the first release. As a technical boy I infected my enemies with powerful hacks that pierced their vital organs, while I scouted the area. I was able to see how my strategy stood out from others, which gave me the feeling of being a tactical razor-sharp working with groups of enemies. When my more elegant skills weren’t up to the task, I could always go at my cybernetic enemies with a baseball bat.

The gunplay, which often feels inevitable at many junctures, has more of the flavor of a warmed-over Far Cry with some weapon concepts, like assault rifles with tracking bullets, that felt lifted directly out of 2012’s Syndicate. While there is an entire weapon upgrade system, with a large number of materials to gather and source, the game’s content is paced in such a way that another, better weapon is always dropping off an enemy corpse, trivializing the entire system. This is a great way to try out many different weapon types. I enjoyed it as a scavenger-lord. This could be frustrating for a tactical player.

Image: CD Projekt Red

A big hope that many of us had was for one thing. Cyberpunk 2077 The company was pondering how to approach storytelling within its science-fictional world. It is a success in building its core characters and placing them in situations that allow us to feel they are three-dimensional human beings with thoughts, feelings and complications. Cyberpunk was the inspiration for this game. Brand identity allowed this game to draw on the rich history of the world created by Mike Pondsmith during the R. Talsorian Games Cyberpunk setting. This was more than 30 year ago.

CD Projekt’s promotional material took pains to tell you about Night City and all of that history, locating V within this nest of relationships before players even got their hands on the product. These world histories and their players are important to give meaning and context to the various areas and factions of the open-world. You need to be able to see that Night City has been divided up into a number of different groups with their individual desires and the traditions they wish for. In turn, those groups provide a backdrop against which we understand the game’s primary characters like Johnny Silverhand, Panam Palmer, or the Arasaka corporate family. Cyberpunk, as a genre is frequently exploring the questions of Who It is limited by What, and novels like Bruce Sterling’s Islands are in the net or William Gibson’s Neuromancer They rely partly on the excitement of seeing their characters smash through social, economic and technical barriers that they have been entrapped in.

The gameplay mode in this game is very much like The Witcher. V the main character is determined by his interactions with other characters. These situations are where V must make difficult choices in an unforgiving world where violence is all around and where life is short.

V is a created character, but V and his many backgrounds, such as a Corporate stooge or Nomad, are not. Cyberpunk 2077A Mass Effect has a greater impact vibe. The other characters are strongly drawn, with their own questlines, and when V enters their orbit, everyone’s life changes in some tangible, notable way.

It works because of the Mass Effect. mode where my understanding of V allowed me to make decisions from their perspective, but there is something lost in the “player-created” nature of V. While Night City has a big cast of characters with their own history with the place, the unwillingness to locate V firmly within that place means that everything sort of washes over me as a player. Geralt meets a new character, or visits a different location. The Witcher 3He knew some of the contexts he was in, so my job as a player was just to help him navigate them and teach me what I could. V has no history and can move from one mission to the next without any connection. He only knows what questgivers tell him. So many things that I did in this game resulted from feeling so specific to a particular place at a certain time. Generic. It is quite amazing to me.

Image: CD Projekt Red

CD Projekt even used design elements to counter this feeling in unusual ways. My choice was Corporate, so the game opened with me firing Arasaka corp. There were additional dialogue options available when corporate politics came into focus. But, this merely allowed me to unlock sarcastic and manipulative dialog responses early in the game. This enabled me to get deeper into conversations with my corpo-speak. By the end, these same Corpo dialogue options became almost exclusively about obedience, pro-corporate approaches, and by the middle of the game. It was at the midstream. A game mechanic describes what it does In the end, I was unable to assume or make assertions about V in order to provide them with a grounding for their role-playing. Many late-game moments were deprived of any gravity.

If there is a strength to be found in this narrative form, it lies in its characters and the struggles you help them through, including Johnny Silverhand, a construct that is trapped in V’s head. The entire plot of the game revolves around trying to eject Johnny, since the chip that trapped him there is slowly killing V. While there are some truly compelling gameplay moments that happen around this mixed-up biopsyche, such as segments where Silverhand controls V’s body and gets involved in rock and roll shenanigans, Silverhand (and Keanu Reeves’ performance) are eclipsed by more marginal characters like the idealist detective River or the aging fixer Rogue. There’s not a single character in Cyberpunk 2077 that isn’t a cyberpunk genre stereotype that has been picked over for 50 years to the point of triteness. However, the characters and their performances kept me engaged so much that I was constantly looking forward to another mission.

As I finished four of the game’s endings, I told a friend that Cyberpunk 2077 It felt strangely like an old game design. This feels like a Mass Effect-styled Far Cry layered on to a Far Cry. It has the same narrative and open-world elements as the former, but with a more modern feel. Which? The Witcher 3 I had to combine a number of existing game ideas in order to create something new. Cyberpunk 2077 but is more fragile than an object by itself. It is possible to feel and play with the staples that hold it together. After 1.5, most of the friction feels less like a result development errors or a lack in time. Instead, they feel like part of the game’s DNA — the faults that were there before any problems in final execution.

Image: Cd Projekt Red

You should think about how major patches are made. They almost always focus on gameplay and technical aspects. There’s been no attempt to soften or explore the cyberpunk genre’s deployment of techno-orientalism in its treatment of Asian culture and characters, which is a huge missed opportunity in a game that spends so much time ruminating on the mistakes of the past, and how one might repair them. The game’s most visible feature is still dominated by a transphobic advertisement. It doesn’t even align with actual-world advertising practice. With this game’s long tail of updates, there are seemingly infinite chances to go deeper, to rethink some assumptions, and to engage with the genre at least as fully as its founding texts did. None of this was deemed to be patchable. It’s more essential, according to some, that new apartments, cars and guns are available.

Patch 1.5 is functional and brings with it Cyberpunk 2077 It can be up to the minimum standards that people believed it should have at launch. The basic concepts in the game are still valid, even though the high watermark was only serviceable. Cyberpunk 2077 They are enjoyable enough for a quick game, but they don’t offer enough depth or insight into the world the game is based on. From pre-release hype to abysmal release to pretty good a year post-release, it’s a cyberpunk story for sure.

It is difficult for me to continue playing the game following this patch without thinking about the many games with more innovative ideas and take on the genre that will not get the second swing. Cyberpunk 2077 will get better in the coming year. Dev experience has taken years to create a familiar and standard 1980s dystopia. It was done in an impressive time frame. It was another day in Night City.

Cyberpunk 2077 On February 15, patch 1.5 was made available for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 (Windows PC), Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Xbox One. CD Projekt Red provided a prerelease download code for the PlayStation 5 to be reviewed. Vox Media is an affiliate partner. Although these partnerships do not impact editorial content, Vox Media could earn commissions from products sold via affiliate links. Find out more. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.